Open

If you want to get me in a really good mood (and let’s face it I know getting me in a good mood is pretty high on your to do list), just tell me to have my house ready for an open inspection at 9am.

Wait for me to wake up an hour earlier than normal, clean like there’s no tomorrow, scrub the shower, hide the toaster, vacuum every speck off the floor. When I am doing the final polish on the sink (because everyone lives with a polished sink), when I am out of breath, exhausted and harried, call me.

Call me at 10 minutes to 9am. Call me and tell me that the open inspection is cancelled.

THAT puts me in a good mood.

Because unnecessary cleaning is a crime against humanity. Add to that one less hour of sleep, and you’ve got a crisis in the Oates house.

Why am I feverishly cleaning for house inspections? Because we want to sell our house. And to sell your house you need to present it in the most perfect light. You need to present it with such outrageous perfection that to maintain the façade in reality would leave you dead inside. You need to present your home, your life in a way that makes others want to be you, makes them want to have what you have.

No one wants to see your hair in the drain, the dribble on your pillow or the greasy roasting pan you couldn’t be bothered to wash so you hid it in the wheel barrow in the shed.

And don’t get me started about kids wanting to poo in the toilet 5 mins before a home inspection. We don’t defecate in this family!!!!!

We need to be ready. Ready to be viewed. Ready to be judged. We need to prepare, polish, sort and primp. We need to worry about what people think, how they will measure us.

We need to be perfect.

Because that’s what Jesus asks of us right? To be perfect? To construct a shell of perfection that is impossible to maintain, all the while letting our insides, our reality, our honesty rot away? To become weak and brittle?

If Jesus came to my open inspection, I reckon I know what he would do. He would walk right past my throw rug and perfectly perched cushions and head straight for the shed. He would lift my greasy roasting pan out of the wheelbarrow and say “I love you Bec”.